As 2013 draws to its gasping end, even NPR has now started broadcasting countdown programs (well, they've been at it for the past two weeks or so really). Today's program was one on the scientific advances of 2013. In the most abstract and circumspect fashion, the advances in immunotherapy was spoken of, everything from chimeric antigen receptors, redirected T-cell killing, advances in vaccine development, and non-traditional antibodies.
The most pertinent part of the reporting came at the end, where the two reporters discussed the importance of public funding versus industry funding for the advancement of clinical medicine (in this case, pertaining to cancer therapeutics).
As the reporters pointed out, funding from both sectors were down in 2013.
The government sequester has stripped most of the meat out of government grant funding agencies (the PRI Science reporter concisely stated that many promising and well conducted research was delayed or terminally frustrated by the actions of our uncompromising elected officials), and that private funding is even more risk adverse in these times of financial down turn (besides, even in the best of times, private funding will not fun projects that does not have clear profit associated with it).
It is precisely in this funding atmosphere that CanFel is trying to discover and bring to bear its first antibody based canine cancer therapeutics. It is precisely because of this funding atmosphere that we have turned directly to the people, that we have turned to Indiegogo for help in aiding our quest to bring antibody therapeutics to veterinary medicine.
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